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And those are just some of the music acts. He backed the original Broadway productions of Dreamgirls and Cats. He made talents as diverse as Tom Cruise and Tim Burton into movie-industry heavyweights. He raised $2 billion — in a single week — for former partners Stephen Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg to start up their own movie studio, DreamWorks SKG. The sum total of his ongoing charitable endeavours is not known.

Geffen has also, in the process, made a lot of money for himself — now retired from the entertainment business and a full-time philanthropist, Forbes magazine most recently lists his net worth at $5.6 billion.

But the 69-year-old über-entrepreneur doesn’t like to talk about that. In fact, now that he’s no longer cutting deals, he doesn’t much like to talk at all. At least not publicly. And never about himself.

Geffen has made an exception for the exceptional PBS profile series American Masters, of which he professes to be a longtime fan. The new documentary, Inventing David Geffen, airs Tuesday night at 8 on WNED.

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Dragged virtually kicking and screaming away from Sardinia and his $300 million yacht, Geffen reluctantly agreed to meet the media in L.A. at the TV network previews in July.

“I don’t tend to think about the past,” he allowed early on in the half-hour press session, which felt more like pulling teeth. “I really don’t reflect on my career. I don’t like to talk about myself. I avoid it as much as possible.”

Something of a handicap when you’re shooting a personal profile — the PBS producers instead had to rely on close to 50 candid up-close interviews featuring many famous and familiar faces, not all of them entirely complimentary.

Geffen’s often bullying, badgering style has earned him almost as many enemies as friends. But as Inventing David Geffen reveals, he has, in almost every case, earned their respect.

It started, archetypically, in the mailroom at the William Morris Agency.

“I’m delivering the mail,” Geffen says, “and I’d have to wait in these offices, and I’d hear these agents on the phone, and I thought, ‘Hmm, they bulls--- on the phone. I can do that.’”

He was right. And he did it very well. The timing was fortuitous — he was 21 and it was the 1960s — and in just a few years he was a music mogul. Eventually he moved into movies as well.

And then, in 1976, everything ground to a halt when he was falsely diagnosed with bladder cancer.

“I just stopped working,” he says. “I thought, ‘Here I am. I’ve been working all my life and made all this money and didn’t have any fun, really.’ I thought I was going to get high and get laid.”

He continued to make money in real estate, but it took five years to earn back his music industry cred. And then another health distraction: the looming spectre of AIDS.

“The HIV thing was an entirely different issue,” the openly gay Geffen says. “People were dropping like flies in the early ’80s and if you were gay, you had no idea whether you had it or not. It was a very, very scary period of time.

“I thought, ‘I’m going to die. I might as well deal with something other than finding recording stars.’ And then when I had the test and I found out that I was HIV-negative, I thought, ‘Oh, I have really not paid attention to my record company. I better get my act together.’ And I did.”

He, of course, went on to even greater success, branching out from the recording industry into theatre and film. Aside from an aborted initiative to buy the New York Times, he now lets the business run itself, mostly feeding his foundation.

If nothing else, the PBS cameras helped him put it all into perspective. “I look back on it, particularly in seeing this film, and I think, ‘Wow, you did all of that.’ I was impressed. I’m proud of all of the things I’ve done.”

On the other hand, he says, “You watch yourself get old and bald. It’s a sobering experience.”

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